The Last Human IV - 53 - Through Faith Alone

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Cloaked in titanium lace, brimming with the contained power of a sun, Yarsi of the Ark screamed through the void. Grit and dust particles bounced off her hull like droplets of rain. The light of a billion stars streaked her chrome-colored plating. Ahead, a shield of warped gravity—delicate, and nearly translucent, and millions of kilometers wide—obscured her view of the Swarm’s armada. 

If her hull grazed that shield, it would invert the gravity down to a single point inside her ship, fracturing her from tip to aft, and rip her inside-out.

Yarsi bloomed her repulsors. Unhurried, she headed directly toward the center of the shield.

The shieldbearer ships retracted. The shield evaporated, like ten thousand umbrellas closing at once, revealing a black sky perforated by a million pixels of light. A wall of warheads. The wall shot past the shieldbearers who unfurled their interconnected shields once more, obscuring the sky and the Swarm’s armada.

The wall was coming at Yarsi of the Ark. And the Ark, toward it. Thus, she bloomed her repulsors even brighter, increasing her acceleration.

Behind the wall, the shield evaporated again, allowing another wall of missiles to pass through. Back on, then off again for another cycle of missiles. Yarsi’s sensors tracked each and every one, including their most likely flight paths. 

And she ignored them. Three other targets held her attention. Each time the shield disappeared, her sensors painted three ships, three towering hulls that lurked at the back of the armada. Each one wore curved plating, suggestive of robes more than armor. Control modules looked like bowed heads with sensor arrays for faces, and great arms crossed high bodies. Flowing metal folds hid vast pockets of armaments and logistics modules and drone hangars. Yarsi’s people had called them Apostles. As did Emorynn, once. Each Apostle was a proxy for the Sovereign’s vast, interconnected brain. No one—not even Emorynn herself—understood them as well as Yarsi of the Ark, for she had both the First Prophet’s knowledge of the future and the lassertane’s instincts, some earned, some inherited, and many more implanted. 

The first of the Apostles sat at the deep center of the Swarm’s net, guarded by a wide cluster of vessels whose long, sturdy tendrils waved and flicked like the arms of brittle stars washed up on a rocky shoreline. Then, the shield went up again, blocking the Apostle from view. Leaving only the walls of missiles. She felt their approach like one feels the breeze. Somewhere inside her, racks of alarms blared, warning her flock to brace themselves. Time to impact: 4.3098 seconds.

Yarsi dumped energy into her repulsors, bringing herself up to maximum survivable thrust. Somewhere deep inside, she heard Ryke shout, “Brace for impact!” 

Time to impact: 0.2056 seconds.

Yarsi of the Ark opened her Ship’s Gate, and jumped. 

The missiles slammed into empty space. Some kept going. Others, set to detonate early, shred themselves into shrapnel or burst into light. Then, the second wave collided with the first, filling the void with a cataclysmic flashing of irradiated light. A fraction of projectiles, the smartest and luckiest ones, turned and scanned space for their missing target. But Yarsi had jumped past them and past the gravity shield. 

In fact, she had jumped one short kilometer away from the first Apostle. And plowed into it. At maximum velocity, her speartip stem slid through the Apostle’s folded armor, separating it into a blossom of sheared metal. Her hull screeched as it slid into the complicated bowels of the Apostle, crumpling its support structures. But thousands of alerts erupted in Yarsi’s systems. Leaks, compromised armor, sensor loss, and moderate structural damage from the impact. With a flick of her thoughts, she dispatched the repair bots. All of them. 

Life support, repulsors, and artificial gravity were still nominal, which was good. A few of the xenos were still standing, despite the impact—a testament to the efficacy of Khadam’s designs. What was left of Yarsi’s heart swelled with pride.

But the maneuver had brought her to the center of the Swarm’s net. And the armada was already reacting. The woven threads, millions of miles of machine-ships, moved like a vast jellyfish bringing its delicate tentacles together. Collapsing toward the Ark.

Yarsi, however, still had her momentum. She flared her repulsors on one side, and turned while balancing her gravity generators to keep her flock from smearing across her decks. A long arc toward the second Apostle. This one wore the same flowing folds of armor, which rippled down the arms that stood out from its sides. Six arms, twisting to aim at the Ark as it powered toward the Apostle. Each arm was capped by disk-like protrusion. As they angled toward her, her sensors picked up six brilliant lights, swirling clockwise and counter-clockwise at the same time. Then, those sensors errored out. Blue lightning crawled over the Apostle’s flowing armor, flickering off into space. Then, all her sensors lost focus. The stars turned into jagged points, the Swarm streaked and jittered. Then, she felt it.

Claws of pure energy crashed against her armor, slicing through her defenses and countermeasures and her very skin. Waves of energy sank into her hull and squealed through her systems, burning everything in their wake. Suddenly starved of power, her repulsors shuttered. Her systems tried to suck in the emergency reserves—unable to find them through the noise—and blinked off. Lights went out, the air flow stopped, the gravity balancers let go. Her mind went dark, and for a brief moment, she was nothing but a tiny, fragile lassertane girl, wrapped in wires, floating through space.

But the Ark didn’t need power. It had momentum. A vast spear head, sliding through the void, the Ark pierced the six-armed Apostle through the heart of its hull. Six arms snapped off as the Apostle’s hull crumpled inward, and was shredded into an expanding cloud of debris.

When Yarsi’s sensors flickered back to life, her body—her lassertane body—exhaled with relief. Back in control … for the moment. But the impact was costly. Cracks in her trusses and beams ached like old bone fractures, and pockets of vacuum punctured her life support, holes in her lungs. A third of her repulsors refused to reignite, and the rest stuttered back to life, struggling to increase acceleration.

Then, she saw movement in the debris cloud that had once been the Apostle. Thousands of crab-like drones crawled out from the debris, ignited their own repulsors, and rocketed toward the Ark. Yarsi redirected her false-gravity outward, throwing up a thin veil of force against the first crabs that sped toward Ark, catching them before they could decelerate. A wave of crabs slammed into the veil of inverted gravity, and shattered, their pieces thrown back into space with their innards wrapped over their hulls, their metal fused into new, mutilated shapes. But the veil, a poor imitation of the Sovereign’s own shield, drained her reserves, so when thousands of crabs altered their course in eerie unison, sliding around the veil, she could do nothing but watch. 

They swam in gliding sheets over the flat planes of her hull. When their tongues dragged across her metal flesh, she felt the bursting of nettles and the piercing of thorns. On the Bridge, her lassertane body bucked and heaved against the braces and wires, rasping with pain. Her first thoughts were agony. Her next thoughts were that she couldn’t afford the distraction. Cut it, she impulsed. Her thought flashed through the Ark’s systems, which sent a command through the memory device to sever the nerves. Suddenly, she was aware of a numbness where her mortal body had been. The pain had stopped, but so had every other sensation in her lassertane self. She couldn’t feel her face. Couldn’t blink. But her mind was still alert, watching the crabs latch onto the Ark, burrowing their obscene tongues into her hull, desperate to reach her critical systems. They drilled into the smooth plating, scoring and gouging and cracking her armor. Her external view blurred and fractured as writhing tongues peeled back layers of armor plating and severed the connections to her sensors.

At the same time, the crabs flared their repulsors. Combined, they reversed her acceleration. Yarsi of the Ark flooded all her available power into her own repulsors. They bloomed with renewed strength, but more of them flickered under the strain and went dark, and the crabs locked her in place. Her internal gate was still dissipating. Too early to jump again. 

And the Swarm descended upon her. Millions of ships closed in a sphere of living machinery, with the Ark at its center. No stars. Only metal. 

Countless weapon systems aimed at the Ark, heedless of their cousins burrowing into her armor. In a moment, they would pour destruction into her. Missiles would fly in overlapping flocks. Cannons would burp bright flashes of light, showering her with explosive shells from on high and below. But, she knew, it was the energy beams that would kill her—slender, needle-like threads of intense power, carried only by the largest  ships. 

The Swarm settled in for the kill. 

And if Yarsi still had control of her mouth, she would have smiled. When Khadam had built the Ark, Yarsi had insisted on one device in particular—an experiential design, borrowed from the long-dead members of Khadam’s Coldsmith clan.

 “It’s never been tested,” Khadam argued. 

Yarsi had written back, “It’s necessary.”

Now, she powered down her Gate. Her repulsors went dark. Her artificial gravity released. Dirt in the habitation gardens, water in the canals, and all the xenos began to float. And the device came to life. It lived in the secret decks, protected by layers of ceramic and steel, inaccessible by any living being—except for her.

Rings of black metal, each one delicately thin and carved with ornate geometry, slid around each other, forming a nearly-solid sphere. Light siphoned into the lattice rings, painting them with burning lines of color in a language of fractals. So rapid and violent was the movement of the Light, even the Ark’s visual sensors could not map every flashing shape. Then again, she didn’t need to—she only needed the thing to work. 

The Swarm contracted. The crabs on her hull burrowed deeper, their repulsors flaring. Far below, one gargantuan dreadnought aimed an absurdly small barrel at her, and fired. A strand of focused energy leaped across the miles in an instant, slicing through a handful of drone crabs before melting into her hull. Breach warnings and pressure alerts and damage reports cascaded through her mind, but Yarsi’s focus was on controlling the device.

The rings blurred. Glowed with a cold intensity. Frost condensed on every nearby surface as the Ark’s internal temperatures plummeted. A coldsnap so fast, the xenos hardly had time to feel it. But she did. She knew, down to the fraction of a degree, how far she could push the device.

Release.

The sphere erupted with Light. Ghostly rings expanded through the walls of the Ark, slicing the void with razor-lines of unmoving time. They painted through flocks of drones, carving lines through their masses. Ships were shorn into segments. Slices of a heavy cruiser collapsed inward, its circuitry and mechanical innards spilling out. But the rings were thin, and millions of machine ships had escaped the touch of the Light.

Yarsi paused. 

Tens of thousands of glowing rings spinning slowly through the void around her. The Swarm, already correcting course to avoid the Light. Unleashing the drones. Firing missiles. Firing everything. Cannons burped blasts of light and electronic interference systems dumped geysers of chaff and malicious signals into her sensors.

Only then did she redirect every last drop of her power into her artificial gravity generator. Her hull tightened, and made a grinding, shrieking noise, and it felt like she was being crushed by a pair of divine hands. Yet, for one brief moment, the Ark was the heaviest object in nearby space. The drone crabs covering Yarsi’s hull were crushed by their own, sudden weight. And the rest of the armada were swept into the rings.

Ships halted, crushing themselves beneath their own momentum. The smaller hulls were smashed into pieces, the larger ones were sliced into pieces, their viscera violently expelled. One massive ship was caught within overlapping rings—it was split open, the halves displaced, and seamlessly inverted into each other. 

Yarsi let go. The device ceased its blurring movement and became unnaturally still. Out in the void, the rings dissipated, leaving behind masses of drone corpses and strangely-malformed ships. Where the Light had touched, black, glittering corrosion now ate into metal. Ash-white veins crawled across mutated hulls, reaching toward shattered sensor beds and cracked repulsor housings. Millions of ships drifted, some scraping against each other, the rest carried along by gravity.

But there were still great shapes lurking in the distance. The Swarm’s largest ships—vast, unwieldy barges—had been pierced by the rings,  but remained functional due to their sheer size. And, like a shepherd in the shadows, the last Apostle towered against the stars. Black, glittering patches ran down one of its ruined flanks, sparkling in the sunlight as it slowly rotated to shield its weakened side from the Ark. It barked some invisible command and, as one, the barges spewed forth their drones. They filled the void like spores, tufting and spooling from the folded bays and hangars, or dropping from the underside like clouds of ink. They blotted out the stars. And then, the near sun dimmed as the clouds occluded even that huge golden-red globe. What remained of Yarsi’s sensors tried to track them all, but the crabs had cut out too many of her eyes.

And behind the drones, long serpentine vessels slithered from the half-ruined body of the Apostle. Delicate, wing-like protrusions unfurled down their lengths. Though the serpents undulated across space, their odd wings trained on the Ark. Broadcasting a signal. Not for her, but for the people she carried. Yarsi looked inward, and saw that her decks were full of people crying out, gnashing their teeth and covering their ears in vain attempts to block out the sound just out of hearing. A human, bio-engineered and augmented, would be protected against the deadly waves, but her people were only xenos… Delicate. Mortal. 

If she could kill the serpents…

But there were dozens of them, and the growing mass of drones hid most of them from view. She could only see undulating silver bodies and bright, chrome wings flashing between the plague of drones. 

The Apostle, then. It was the only hope. Yarsi of the Ark knew the Apostle’s general location, judging by how fast it had been moving. But at these distances, she could only guess. And a guess was a death sentence. 

Half-blind, she scrambled to find it, to detect even a hint of its presence. Nothing on imaging, lidar was useless, x-ray blocked by noise. Overwhelmed or dead, her senses failed her. Inside, the screams of the dying tugged at her processors. The serpents’ waves resonating in their bones and racked their brains. Squeezed every living being into one final agony. Even my own body is in here, dying. She needed to think. To work this out. No time. Not for strategy. Not even for chance.

Only prayer. To the memory of the First Prophet. Emorynn, guide me.

Half-blind and dying, Yarsi of the Ark angled at a specific, featureless point in the dark cloud of drones. She thought of Laykis, and how the android had suffered ten thousand years for her faint glimmer of faith alone.

And Yarsi rammed the last of her repulsors to full power.

The Ark jolted forward, and all the xenos were thrown back against the walls. Those who had been drifting in the open decks were slammed a long way back to the rear walls, their bones crushed. Many died on impact. Those in the smaller chambers, or inside their dwellings, or on the Bridge were mostly safe. Yarsi’s own body was tugged and battered inside her restraints as the Ark kicked across space, and pierced the cloud of the Swarm. 

If she was wrong—if the Apostle was even a fraction of a degree out of place—there was nothing she could do about it now. She could turn the Ark, maybe, but the force would only smear all the xeno bodies inside… including hers.

Thousands of drones pelted and rattled and tried to latch onto the Ark’s hull, only to break upon contact as the spearhead ship gained momentum. She carved a gouge through thousands of miles of machine plague. A flash of silver as one of the serpents tried to wriggle out of her way, but her prow sliced through its narrow body, slicing it in half before the thing broke apart. 

Then, the clouds of drones were behind them. Stars glimmered. The near sun shone bright. And the Apostle lay dead ahead. Its repulsors bloomed as it tried, desperately, to move its towering bulk out of the Ark’s path. But Emorynn’s memory of the future was perfect. The speartip slid into the Apostle’s half-corroded armor, almost directly in the center of the ship. Metal separated, crumpling, rolling, exploding out as the Ark broke through. 

The drone barges no longer spewed. The drones went still. The serpents went rigid, sailing lifelessly into the clouds of drones, crashing and breaking apart. What was left of the armada drifted. Glittering. Broken. One day, maybe, to be dragged into the sun and melted down to nothing. 

Only Yarsi remained. 

Gently, she redirected her false gravity inward, allowing the xenos to sink back to the floor. Her hospitality systems churned furiously as they sent out medical constructs and opened emergency pathways to the pre-fab hospitals littered throughout the habitation and barracks decks. So many, dead, but she would help as many as she could. 

Yarsi’s sensors picked up movement on her Bridge. Hundreds of xenos were in circles around the command platform. Despite the normalized gravity, none of them were standing. They were on the ground. Injured? No. Starched military uniforms next to priestly robes next to technician’s garb next to royalty. Heads bowed, arms outstretched. Worshiping her, for what she had become. 

“Praise,” they sang together, “Praise the Prophet, the Maker made anew!”

Yarsi wanted to share in their wonder, to bask in their victory. But there was a hole where Yarsi’s joy should have been. Emorynn’s memories lived in her mind—an immaculate guide.  And they would guide her a little while longer. But Emorynn had cut out the last pieces of her memory. Destroyed them, so that Yarsi could not know what she had seen. 

A black curtain hung over the future. And even in victory, fear stirred in the heart of the Ark.

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